I first became interested in Perl waaay back when WWWBoard was just starting to be in vogue. I wanted to add some dynamic content to my parents' site in the form of forums, web forms, guestbook, etc., but the only available scripts had a horribly ugly interface and limited security / moderation features. So I learned Perl to modify the scripts. Of course, the code I came up with back then was pretty lousy, and I didn't really get much beyond the newbie level until I found Perlmonks.